I know this question must have been asked before, but why are there so many people in China? What factor(s) made the population grow so much bigger than any other country? And finally, what forum should this question be in?
Well, it’s a fucking huge place, much of it fertile land, that’s been settled for thousands and thousands of years. Lots of room + lots of food + lots of time = lots of people.
Because it was Sunday, and the drugstores were closed.
China is a big place, but like India, it did not always have the huge population (or better, population density) we think of today.
Population takes off when medical care and public sanitation starts to reduce infant mortality. Population levels off or declines as women become more educated and the society becomes rich enough that a wealthy old age does not depend on children.
So India and China as just in an elongated period much like Europe went through from 1850-1900.
Already Japan has a rapidly decreasing population.
Mao pushed for a huge population increase fueled by fears of a massive war and the catchphrase “each mouth is born with two hands” (meaning, one hand to feed the mouth, and one hand is surplus for the society).
People in China were criticized in the 1950’s and 1960’s for not being “patriotic” with only 3 children.
Now there is a big problem of a greying population wave in the coming decades.
Also people would keep having kids until they got a boy, rather than being satisfied with, let’s say, three girls.
As noted, China is not a small country, geographically, so it has a good chance to have a large population just based on area. (Nations that are in the same size range with lower populations include Russia and Canada with enormous regions of near-Arctic and Arctic lands with thin soil and very short growing seasons, Brazil, with its enormous jungle/rain forest expanses, hard to penetrate and also poor for agriculture, and Australia with it huge desert.) We’ll come back to the U.S. in a bit.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, nearly all large societies grew up around farming that was most easily supported by consistent sources of water. The earliest civilizations are often known by the rivers around which they formed: Yangtze, Yellow, Indus, Ganges, Nile, Mesopotamia (“middle of the rivers”–Tigris and Euphrates). Even today, that remains a strong point to hold a society together. The two most populous countries in Africa are Nigeria, with much of its population clustered around the Niger, and Egypt with nearly all its population living along the Nile.
China has one of the oldest civilizations. It has two long rivers with drainage basins covering 2.5 million square kilometers, in a temperate climate with good soil. India has two rivers, the Indus and Ganges, much of it in a hotter, drier climate with basins of 1.8 million square kilometers. (A third “Indian” river, the Brahmaputra, has a basin of 1.7 million kilometers, but much of that is in China and Bangladesh.) The Chinese agricultural centers are not hemmed in by desert (as in Egypt and Mesopotamia and, to an extent, India) or by mountains as in India. Therefore, China has had the longest period to develop the largest land area to feed itself.
The area in which the U.S. is located has had far less time to develop. The lack of animals suitable as beasts of burden stymied the development of agriculture, in general, meaning that much of that region (particularly West of the Mississippi) was not adapted to agriculture until the European invasion. However, that invasion was nearly simultaneous with the Industrial Revolution. Changes in the methods of agriculture led to the development of an urban society, requiring fewer children (who would survive) to run the farms, while improvements in medicine and related fields meant that fewer children would die, again meaning that fewer children were required to sustain the family (or its name), leading to generally lower birth rates.
China (and India) have both lagged a bit on those developments, although they are beginning to catch up. So, starting with larger populations, China and India have been caught on the transition from subsistence agriculture (requiring large families) to urban/industrial economies and they will need a generation or two to change their birth practices. (China, of course, has attempted to regulate those practices by law.)
If you ignore national boundaries, you can find some other areas that had similar population densities 100 to 150 years ago, but in places such as Europe, the Industrial Revolution put the brakes on population growth earlier than it did in China.
So the short answer is that China has had the largest area, for the longest time, with good agriculture to keep people alive.
The following statement somehow dropped out of my last post during edit.
China also has a remarkably wide, flat topography surrounding its rivers in the agricultural region, unlike, for example, Europe, that has many good rivers, but is often broken up by steep hills or even mountains.
This could probably have been posted in GQ, but I left it here in case someone decided to challenge one of the posts. If it does not turn into a brawl, I’ll move it later.
I’d take issue with this. According to the CIA world factbook, China’s land is 14% arable (and declining), whereas the US is at 19% and Germany & France at 33%. China has a buttload of mountains, and since the land around the big river basins has basically been completely used for centuries, there’s been a need to push production out into less desirable areas.
Like those infamous pictures of terraced rice fields on the sides of steep hills: that’s not evidence of plentiful land, that’s evidence of the circular demand of more food to feed more people needed to grow more food.
He’s talking about “China Proper”, where most of the Chinese population lives. The percentage goes up a bit if you remove Tibet and XinJiang, the two largest “provinces”.
However, the question was how did China get where it is now and 14% of 9,326,410 sq km is still 1,305,697 sq km. The Chinese may, indeed, push themselves into drought or famine, but the way they got to their current position was to exploit the plains beteween the rivers.
China certainly has mountains (and the plains do not look like the flatter parts of Iowa or Kansas), but the mountains tend to ring wide, (decreasingly) fertile basins rather than breaking them up into choppy valleys separated by peaks.
And Alaska is the same size as Xinjiang, and our desert Southwest would certainly offset a decent portion of the Tibetan areas.
I’m not disputing the point that making the farmland China does have more productive has been a very major development in the last 90 years or so. But the point I should have made clearer is that the availability in land and the productivity of it are not sufficient to explain population growth. The US has had more arable land and more productivity out of it for this whole century, and yet our population growth is peanuts next to China’s. We’ve grown by what, the very low nine figures, and China has grown by roughly a billion.
Whoops, should have finished my thought. So the productivity of the land is a big deal, but China’s population really started around the time of the Industrial Revolution/Qing Dynasty, although the the population growth really hit the accelerator after the end of the Qing in the early 20th century.
So unless I’m missing something, big increases in the productivity of the land really couldn’t have been a major factor from 1750 to 1900, because the technology that helped the West so much just couldn’t have been widespread in China at that time.
Some, inlcuding (if I remember correctly) Jared Diamond, posit that Europe lagged behind in certain aspects of development, especially from about 500 to 1500 AD, because its great rivers (Danube, Rhine, not sure which others – Volga, maybe?) happen to run through so many lingustic/culture regions, which held back (and still holds back) political unity and the economies of scale which come with that.
May be total crap, but there you have it. (For one thing, China’s lingustic and cultural unity isn’t as deep as many assume, although its administrative unity, admittedly, goes way back to the first centuries of the Christian era, in many ways.)